Jim.Sweeney: October 2008 Archives

An interesting debate has broken out in conservative legal circles about the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that threw out the gun control law in Washington, D.C. As outlined by Adam Liptak, the Supreme Court correspondent of the New York Times (and a one-time legal adviser for The Press Democrat newsroom), a couple of the most prominent and respected conservative judges on the federal bench are taking exception, and they're using fighting words, comparing Judge Antonin Scalia's opinion to another bête noire of the right, Roe v. Wade.

"The Roe and Heller courts are guilty of the same sins," Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III wrote in an article to be published in the spring in The Virginia Law Review.  Wilkinson is a Reagan appointee to the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals and has been on the short list for recent Supreme Court vacancies.

Judge Richard A. Posner, a Reagan appointee to the 7th Circuit and also mentioned as a possible Supreme Court appointee, blasted the ruling over the summer in an article in the New Republic. He too accused the Supreme Court of usurping legislative powers in overturning the gun control laws. This, he wrote, "was the mistake that the Supreme Court made when it nationalized abortion rights in Roe v. Wade."

In essence, they criticized the court for finding that the Second Amendment grants an individual right to gun ownership as opposed to a right for armed militias, such as state National Guards. Wilkinson argues that an equally-compelling case can be made either way, so the question of regulation should be left to the states.

On this issue, paradoxically, many liberal legal scholars have concluded that Second Amendment rights are individual rights and not limited to militias.

Some Libertarian-leaning scholars disagree on that point, but criticize the Scalia opinion for endorsing a variety of restrictions on gun ownership.

"Nothing in our opinion," he wrote, "should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms."

So here's where I'm probably going to tick off a lot of people. I think the liberal scholars are correct: There is an individual right to gun ownership. I also think Scalia was dead right about "laws imposing conditions and qualifications ..." As a youngster in Colorado, I had to pass a firearms and hunting safety class before I could obtain a hunting license. The class, by the way, was given by the National Rifle Association. From various Web sites, I gather that adults also must take a hunting safety class in Colorado and that 49 of the 50 states have some sort of requirement.

I'd like to see a similar prerequisite for gun ownership. Pass a basic safety class - and then be legally accountable if your firearm gets in the hands of child or someone else who shouldn't have it.

What do you think?

-- Jim Sweeney

Freitas is the subject of a complaint to the state Fair Political Practices Commission, alleging that she concealed the occupations of developers who gave money to her campaign.

"It's ridiculous to think you're supposed to call everyone who gives you a check," Freitas said.

Well, no, it's not ridiculous. In fact, that's the law. And for good reason. The voters are entitled to know who is funding your campaign (and your opponents' campaigns, too).

If you've got time to cash the check and spend the money, you've got to make time to find out who gave it to you.

Freitas is no doubt correct when she says the complaint is politically motivated. But I've been reading campaign fund-raising reports for 25 years and, in my humble opinion, the biggest problem with these reports is the consistent failure of political candidates to include the occupation or employer or their donors. It's the law (for local, state and federal candidates), but it gets blown off on a regular basis by campaigns of all political stripes.

The New York Times recently reported on similar failures at the federal level, pointing out false names in donor reports from Barack Obama and a smaller number of donors reported by John McCain with names but no other identifying information.

What makes campaign finance laws work is transparency. Given the growing influence of independent expenditures and the insistence of candidates that they need adequate funding to respond to outside groups, I've largely given up on the concept of public financing. That, in turn, means that we aren't going to see spending limits; they would be unconstitutional without public financing or some other carrot. So, what we're left with is transparency. It might take time, it might be a headache for campaigns, but those are lousy excuses for candidates not bothering to find out who is bankrolling their campaigns.

It would be good to see the same rules extended to groups that hide behind nonpartisan claims and nonprofit status, which allow them to legally avoid disclosing their donors. One such group is Tell the Truth, an amorphous (read anonymous) group that turns up at election time in Sonoma County to point out "inconsistent" statements by political candidates. It just released a new one involving the Petaluma City Council race. The group often makes valid points, though they curiously only notice inconsistencies from liberal-labor candidates while claiming no interest in the outcome of elections. I think pointing out inconsistencies is worthwhile. We do it in the news media (and should do it more). I think Tell the Truth would be a lot more credible if they told us who was bankrolling their efforts.

-- Jim Sweeney

Remember John Edwards' $400 haircut? How about Bill Clinton's $200 coiffure on the runway at LAX?

Something tells me this isn't going to make the same headlines, but Politico.com reports that the Republican National Committee has dropped $150,000 on new clothes for Sarah Palin since the start of September.

Politico went through campaign finance reports filed by the RNC and found spending sprees of $49,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and $75,000 at Nieman-Marcus as well as smaller expenditures at Barney's, Bloomingdale's, Steiniauf & Stroller (a baby store) and Atelier (a men's clothing store), all attributed to "campaign accessories" in a section of the report labeled "itemized coordinated expenditures," which covers RNC expenses on behalf of the vice presidential campaign.

The RNC, not so surprisingly, had no comment.

I suppose given the state of the economy, the retailers were thrilled, and perhaps we should thank the Alaska governor for doing her part to stimulate the economy.

-- Jim Sweeney

A pillar of the conventional wisdom of American politics is that voters lie to pollsters about matters of race. It's called the Bradley effect, named for former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, who seemingly defied the polls in losing the 1982 California gubernatorial election to George Deukmejian.

The subject of the Bradley effect has come up in the past few weeks as national polls have shown Barack Obama beginning to pull away in the presidential election. In the past few days, two veterans of the 1982 gubernatorial campaign - one a Democrat, the other a Republican - argued that there was no Bradley effect.

Nelson Rising, who ran the Bradley campaign, said on KPCC radio in Los Angeles that internal campaign polls showed Bradley's lead slipping and said a handgun control measure on the same ballot drove up the turn-out in what he called "Eastern California" which isn't a good hunting ground for a Los Angeles mayor or a Democrat. You can link to the interview via laobserved.com.

On Monday, Sal Russo, who worked on the Deukmejian campaign and later served as deputy chief of staff for the governor, made a similar case in an op-ed commentary in the Wall Street Journal. In the final month before the election, Russo said, the campaign shifted its focus to crime in Los Angeles. There also was a strong emphasis on turning out disaffected Democrats in the interior part of the state who were opposed to the gun control measure. Russo credits the effort with both Deukmejian's victory and that of Pete Wilson, who defeated Jerry Brown in a contest for a U.S. Senate seat.

Whether Obama wins or loses, we'll probably hear more about the Bradley effect and political scientists will try to measure the role of race in the presidential vote. I suspect there is some marginal effect - and may have been in 1982 - but I don't believe it's going to change the outcome on Nov. 4. And apparently in the 1982 election in California, the first one that I had a small role in covering, those closest to the campaigns don't think race played a significant role either.

How do you think it fits into the calculus of the presidential election, if it fits at all?

-- Jim Sweeney

Here are some thoughts from columnists, commentators and political pros around the country (and around the blogosphere) on the final presidential debate:

E.J. Dionne, the Washington Post: This trio of attacks (Bill Ayres, ACORN and Joe the Plumber) almost certainly did McCain good among those whose votes he already has: very conservative Republicans who share Joe's view that Obama is some kind of socialist. But it's unlikely that McCain helped himself much with the moderate and middle-class voters who have drifted away from him.

Byron York, the National Review: You can talk all you want about Joe the Plumber, but the moment of the final presidential debate, held last night at Hofstra University on Long Island, came when John McCain said, quickly and cleanly, "Sen. Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President Bush, you should have run four years ago" ... It's fair to say Team McCain was delighted with the way the Bush line came out, and they were also happy that McCain was able to steer so much of the debate to the issue of Joe Wurzelbacher, a.k.a. Joe the Plumber, an Ohio man who confronted Obama this week with concerns that Obama's proposals would raise taxes on the business Wurzelbacher hoped to buy.

Steve Chapman, Chicago Tribune: The sneering tone, the contemptuous glare, the mirthless laughter and the sour smile just made him hard to take. And if he's hard to take for 90 minutes, will Americans really want to take him for four years?

On the substance of the debate, McCain more or less held his own. But on TV, what you say is often less important than how you say it. By that measure, McCain did more damage to his campaign than Obama ever could.

Robert Shrum, Huffington Post: (McCain) had to be in command, steady and reassuring, but his partisans were urging all-out war on Obama's character. When he takes that course, and he soon did, the polls show that voters turn away. They worry a lot more right now about paying their bills than about some guy named Bill Ayres. (But that would come from McCain -- because that's all he's got...) And McCain had to know Obama would be ready, not just to answer and dismiss the attacks, but to cite them as proof that McCain can't deal with real concerns like the economy. And he can't: he just keeps repeating his tired falsehood about Obama raising taxes on most Americans and the middle class, when in fact he cuts them and Obama wins the exchange hands down.

Arianna Huffington, Huffington Post: This debate was won on the reaction shots. Every time Obama spoke, McCain grimaced, sneered, or rolled his eyes. By contrast, every time McCain was on the attack, Obama smiled. It was like watching a split-screen double feature -- Grumpy Old Men playing side by side with Cool Hand Luke.

Kathleen Parker, the Washington Post: At this point, most voters who care have figured out where the two men stand and differ on health care and the economy. Given that people ultimately vote for The Person rather than The Issues, the final debate needed to answer lingering questions of character, trust and judgment. If McCain hoped to gain ground by highlighting Obama's association with Bill Ayers, he failed. Obama's recitation of his relationship with the former terrorist-turned-education-professor -- serving on an educational reform board funded by a friend of Ronald Reagan -- made it seem a non-issue. So much for Obama's terrorist pals.

Paul Alexander, the Daily Beast: During this debate season, we did not have three different McCains. We had two tepid, placating McCains, offering pleasant, affable commentary carefully chosen not to upset anyone, especially his opponent, before the "real" McCain appeared last night. The most passionate moment in McCain's campaign so far was the moving, from-the-gut call-to-arms at the end of his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention--the fighter calling his fellow citizens to his cause. That was what we saw in the third presidential debate--McCain the fighter taking it to Barack Obama, who looked on the defense most of the night.

Rich Lowry, the New York Post: Barack Obama must have awesome powers of concentration. He kept his attention last night from wandering onto measuring the White House drapes and drawing up invitation lists for state dinners ... Overall, McCain may have helped himself, but only marginally. He still has lots of ground to make up, and badly needs an Obama misstep in the weeks ahead. Maybe Obama will let his attention wander - thinking about those drapes.

Hey, if you haven't had enough of presidential debates, the minor party candidates - Ralph Nader, Cynthia McKinney, Chuck Baldwin and, perhaps, Bob Barr - go at it on Sunday. C-Span is expected to be there to record the debate, which begins at 5 p.m. Pacific time. No word yet if it will be broadcast live.

-- Jim Sweeney

How do you think tonight's final presidential debate shapes up?

Does John McCain emphasize his new economic proposal, featuring incentives for savings and tax cuts for seniors who tap their retirement savings and people who lose money in the market? Or does he go after Barack Obama, using questions about ex-Weatherman William Ayres to try to raise doubts that might reverse McCain's sharp slide in the polls?

And what about Obama? To use a sports analogy, does he try to run out the clock? He too has a new economic stimulus plan. Or does he go after McCain's potential weak spots, such as his ties to Iran-Contra figure John Singlaub?

I imagine that Obama would like to keep this debate tame, but I'm not sure which route I'd advise if I were part of the McCain camp. Either one has its risks, but barring something unforeseen this will be his last, best chance to change the dynamics of this campaign.

As we did last week, we'll have a forum at pressdemocrat.com, offering viewers a chance to comment during and after the debate. My colleague Paul Gullixson and I will be watching and posting comments. We hope you will, too.

-- Jim Sweeney

The lead prosecutor in the federal case against William Ayres and other members of the Weather Underground weighed in today with a letter to the New York Times - defending Barack Obama from guilt-by-association and praising Ayres' behavior since his days bombing public buildings to protest the Vietnam War.

William C. Ibershof, who was a federal prosecutor in Michigan and now lives in Mill Valley, also raised a name familiar to local readers in his letter, W. Mark Felt.

Felt, the former assistant director of the FBI who is retired in Santa Rosa, was Deep Throat, the Watergate source of Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward. Iberhof lays the blame for the failed prosecution of Ayres on Felt and former Attorney General John N. Mitchell, citing their tactics in tracking the Weather Underground.

Here's the text of Ibershof's letter:

Re "Politics of Attack" (editorial, Oct. 8) and "Obama and '60s Bomber: A Look Into Crossed Paths" (front page, Oct. 4):

As the lead federal prosecutor of the Weathermen in the 1970s (I was then chief of the criminal division in the Eastern District of Michigan and took over the Weathermen prosecution in 1972), I am amazed and outraged that Senator Barack Obama is being linked to William Ayers's terrorist activities 40 years ago when Mr. Obama was, as he has noted, just a child.

Although I dearly wanted to obtain convictions against all the Weathermen, including Bill Ayers, I am very pleased to learn that he has become a responsible citizen.

Because Senator Obama recently served on a board of a charitable organization with Mr. Ayers cannot possibly link the senator to acts perpetrated by Mr. Ayers so many years ago.

I do take issue with the statement in your news article that the Weathermen indictment was dismissed because of "prosecutorial misconduct." It was dismissed because of illegal activities, including wiretaps, break-ins and mail interceptions, initiated by John N. Mitchell, attorney general at that time, and W. Mark Felt, an FBI assistant director.

Interesting stuff, but I doubt it will satisfy critics of Obama and Ayres, including a retired San Francisco police officer who has written to us about the prospect, long suspected by authorities, that the Weather Underground was responsible for a 1970 bombing at a San Francisco police station that killed a police sergeant. We plan to run James Para's commentary soon on our pages.

-- Jim Sweeney

Here's one vote against the town hall format from Tuesday's debate.

It's not the questions from the audience or the public at large that trouble me; I think they were good questions and reflected people's serious concerns. But there was no chance to follow up, no give-and-take as we saw in the first debate.

And there were times we needed it.

I think John McCain made big news early in the debate when he said, "As president of the United States, I would order the secretary of the treasury to immediately buy up the bad home loan mortgages in America and renegotiate at the new value of those homes, at the diminished value of those homes and let people make those, be able to make those payments and stay in their homes. Is it expensive? Yes."

McCain's mortgage statement may have been the single most significant statement of the debate - and we heard no more. I suspect we will in the next few days. That's a dramatically different approach than the one taken last week to target banks and other financial institutions. There were some advocates of targeting homeowners instead. Let's see where that goes.

I also wanted to hear more about health care as right or responsibility.

An obvious follow-up for McCain would have been, "Whose responsibility?"

And for Obama, "Is this an unchecked right to all the most advanced (and expensive) treatments? Without responsibility for any of the cost?"

One point in favor of Tuesday's format: Having an audience present discouraged either candidate from sinking into a playground session of "His neighbor is a terrorist" and "His patron bankrupted a lot of old people in the savings and loan scandal."

I look forward to the last debate. I wish there were more of them. But we need a format that breaks away from sound bites from stump speeches and digs for details. That's the strength of the moderator model.

What do you think?

-- Jim Sweeney

The state Legislature adopted a budget less than a month ago, and it's already may have turned upside down. If it hasn't, there's little doubt that it will soon. The budget was intended to push the mess into next year and onto the next Legislature. In that sense, it only may succeed because the election is coming up fast.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger meets Wednesday with the party leaders from the state Senate and Assembly. The Big Five didn't make much progress on the budget this summer, and there are plenty of lawmakers angry that their bills were vetoed. Schwarzenegger set a record by vetoing about 35 percent of the legislation passed this year, in many cases saying the late budget didn't give him time to review bills in detail.

The next food fight may start sooner than we think.

We will editorialize on the budget in Wednesday's paper. But the best description I've seen yet was in a column today by Dan Walters of the Sacramento Bee. He included this quote from an as-yet-unpublished commentary by Al Checchi, the mega-investor who ran for governor in 1990 and lost the Democratic primary to Gray Davis:

"The self-delusion manifested in the manner that California 'balanced' the current fiscal  year budget, the myopia involved in ignoring the magnitude of future year shortfalls, and the abdication of fiscal responsibility in failing to provide a  feasible basis for funding the long-term pension and health care obligations  promised California's public employees, make Wall Street executives, by  comparison, paragons of fiscal responsibility."

Ouch.

-- Jim Sweeney

Back in August, I wrote about legislation that would commit California to apportion its 55 electoral votes based on the national popular vote in presidential elections. Like 47 other states, California allocates its electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis.

Similar proposals have been offered in about half the states.

All of the proposals are contingent on approval by a combination of states representing 270 electoral votes - the total required to elect a president.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed the California bill, saying a change of that magnitude ought to be presented to the voters. He encouraged supporters to try that route.

If this was on the ballot in 2010, how would you vote?

Here's a Reader's Digest version of the arguments pro and con:

Under the current system, supporters say, presidential elections are decided by a small handful of states in which the outcome isn't largely predetermined. You know the list: Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Missouri, occasionally a few others. Many supporters, of course, also are unhappy that President Bush was elected with less than a majority in 2000. That has happened three other times in U.S. history

Critics of a popular-vote-based plan say small states would never see a presidential candidate. They also say the current system requires candidates to appeal to more than one or two regions of the country, and warn about the tyranny of the majority - a phrase that originated in Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, though James Madison wrote about it a half-century earlier in the Federalist Papers.

-- Jim Sweeney

Every legislative session has its outrages, and many of them don't surface until bills already are passed and signed into law. This year, we've got a late-breaking outrage involving a veto.

Here's the story, courtesy of Timm Herdt of the Ventura County Star:

Fillmore, a small city in Ventura County, cut a deal to create a local sales office for Owens & Minor, a major supplier of medical supplies. Because the sales were officially completed in Fillmore, the city gets the local share of the sales tax. In the past, the orders went straight to distribution centers in Vista, Industry and Livermore, and those cities collected the sales tax. One city raiding another is nothing unusual. This one is worth about $5 million a year. What's different here is the side deal cut by Fillmore: it's giving 85 percent of the sales tax revenue to the broker who arranged the deal. That's a cool $4.25 million a year that won't be paying for cops, firefighters and other public services in Vista, Industry, Livermore or Fillmore.

As my colleague Paul Gullixson put it, this deal would embarrass a Chicago ward-heeler.

Now to the just concluded legislative session and the veto.

Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, a Democrat whose district includes Livermore, introduced legislation to undue the kickback. Owens & Minor lawyers pointed out that a contract's a contract, so the bill was amended to prohibit any similar deals in the future.

The bill was supported by the League of California Cities, the California State Association of Counties and nearly unanimous majorities in both houses of the Legislature. And it was vetoed Friday by the governor, who cited his pique with the overdue state budget and invited Hancock to try again next year.

If anything the overdue budget should have underscored the value of this legislation. Cities and counties are in trouble too. It's bad enough that they pick each other's pockets, but skimming money off the top for private interests sounds a lot like Nathan Detroit's floating crap game in "Guys and Dolls."

Well, for one broker, luck was a lady tonight.

-- Jim Sweeney